From Booklist
Crowther's collection opens with a magnificent homage to Ray Bradbury, "Some Burial Place, Vast and Dry" (the title is one of several references to Whitman), in which the last survivor of a lost colony remembers his home and is visited by it. Despite that tough first act, the quality of what follows remains consistent. That includes a few more tributes to Bradbury, including "Setting Free the Daughters of the Earth," a variation of Fahrenheit 451 in which one of the last bibliophiles subversively reintroduces literature to a bookless society. Crowther doesn't limit himself to thoughtful tributes. In "Heroes and Villains," he provides insight into the real life of a supervillain, for even supervillains have mothers. He also tackles such classic themes as alien visitation, time travel in the strange "Palindromic," and cloning in "A Worse Place Than Hell," in which Abraham Lincoln is lost in modern-day New York. These lovely and thoughtful stories are speculative fiction at pretty much its best, conjuring self-contained worlds that, for all the stories' brevity, teem with life. Regina Schroeder
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